“The Dude himself, one of the great characters of the modern cinema, is an assemblage who’s as closely defined by his void zones as by his traits; his shambling-slacker manner, an apparent parody of the American sixties, turns out to be its apotheosis. A dropout, a stoner, a hedonist without even the energy to pursue much pleasure, Jeffrey Lebowski is a secretly great man, the truly big Lebowski, whose illustrious past, dropped into the story under postcoital questioning from the internationally celebrated artist Maude Lebowski (no relation) (played by Julianne Moore), is itself a sort of casualty of a war: he was a crucial New Left behind-the-scenes activist in the early sixties and a founder of another, more overtly confrontational New Left group in 1970.”

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